The Rider Masterfully Channels Reality To Contemplate How We Define Ourselves Against Societal Expectations

We'd all like to believe we have a firm grasp on how our identity is formed but that's simply not true. Our identity is much like a river, it ebbs and flows depending on what it runs up against. All those external factors in our lives, some big, others small, have an impact on how we define ourselves. Sometimes such outermost circumstances help us to grow in positive ways, but sometimes they're more constrictive than anything else on our personalities, particularly when it relates to a society trying to keep someone from stepping out of traditional norms. Such a specific scenario is what the lead character of the tremendously thoughtful Chloe Zhao directorial effort The Rider is grappling with.

Realism And Scripted Recreations Collide In Close-Up

Utilizing the filming style of a documentary for a fictional scripted affair is a style of filmmaking that's existed for eons now and has been popularized in the modern era by the likes of The Office and Borat. A cousin of sorts to that type of movie is the Docufiction, which merges documentary with fictional elements. The first American entry in this subgenre is apparently the 1926 motion picture Moana (yes, there was another Moana before last year's Disney musical), but one of the more acclaimed examples of this style of storytelling is an Iranian film from Abbas Kiarostami released in 1990 called Close-Up,